


Books

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Bible, F/M, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nurses & Nursing, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 00:28:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6930610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What they take from the Book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Books

Alice Green

Alice Green’s favorite book of the Bible, if she could be said to have one, was Genesis. It was the first and as the youngest in her family, the afterthought, not a boy, always less than Emma, she liked that nothing preceded Genesis. She could easily envision the garden. In her mind, it was a little like the garden at the back of Mansion House, but with the apple tree right smack at the center and then rolling hills and flowery meadows before the true wildnerness began. There was no wilderness in Alexandria and Alice found she missed what she had never seen. It was a world she could never visit but one she could readily imagine—a tree laden with red fruit, a man and a woman, all the creatures of the field and forest and even the fish leaping in the rivers, silver from blue. She also liked the great Ark, the family small, just five like her own though Noah had no daughter. All the animals were paired. As a young child, it made sense to her; she had two feet, two hands, two blond braids tied with two red ribbons. Genesis had angels with flaming swords, beautiful veiled women, and a coat so glorious it was different every time Alice imagined it.

Sometimes, Alice idly turned the pages of the family Bible where Greens and Morrises, Allens and Coopers twined backward in ever-fading ink, the bold black of her name only a tea-colored brown for the great-grandmother she was named for. The cover of the book was a green so dark it was nearly black. She thought the snake would have been that color. But its eyes would have glowed like the rubies in her mother’s jewel-box and its tongue would be gold, liquid and poisonous. She thought of the snake as it moved through the branches of the tree, the rustle of the leaves, the rub of the ridged bark against the scales. Once she had believed Adam and Eve were stupid but unfairly blamed, as she had felt when Jimmy tricked her into taking a jam tart from the kitchen. Now she thought it was the snake who was maligned. What else could it be but itself? It saw how the world was made, how it should be remade. She had been baptized and was a member of her church so she knew not to say anything but she found herself thinking these days of the snake’s great golden tongue and how it drew a golden circle about Eve.

Emma Green

Emma liked to think about Queen Esther as Belinda brushed out her hair. This took quite a while, one hundred long, even strokes from the crown of her hair until it was shining and she would sit very still and imagine Esther as she was arrayed by her hand-maidens and waited to be chosen by the King. And then she would think of how she set the crown on her head, a silver veil draping her like starlight and moonlight interwoven, a rope of pearls glowing against dusky skin, and prepared to go before the King, even if it should mean her death. How brave she had been, how willing to sacrifice all for her people, her love, her life! She paid little attention to the men, how Haman built his own trap, what Mordecai must have felt sending his only niece to the palace, if the King ever had regret. 

As she walked the hallways of Mansion House that had once been so familiar, she thought how Esther must have paced the graveled paths of the palace gardens, trailed by servants with huge plumy fans of peacock feathers. She might have felt an ache within her for the narrow alleys of her home, the baked brick walls with their windows cut deep and grated with iron, forever lost.

Aurelia Johnson

Aurelia had gone to the church service the plantation held every Sunday. Every slave had gone for there was no choice, but still she would have gone if she could have chosen. To be among people and to be Aurelia, not invisible, not just a rounded body, a pair of hands always ready to work. She loved to lift her voice up and see the true smiles of the women beside her as she let the Lord sing through her soul. She had in her as many psalms as there were written; the words called to her, were called from her, as Gabriel had been called from her and the milk to give him suck from her breasts.

Now in this strange place, the cauldrons were open to the sky, unroofed. The steam might burn and then flutter away on the back of a butterfly, white men leered openly but could be rebuked; it was a land of promises half-kept. The psalms tied her to herself and wrapped her round with comfort when she would break, longing for Gabriel. There was always one to fill the chinks around her and the air that could not contain her, the light that could not enfold her. When she lay on her pallet and a shriek was rising within her for her baby, she thought “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.” It would be enough to get her from one moment to the next without her furious grief washing everything away, a cauldon of boiling bleach spilled across the ground, of boiling salt seeding the earth.

When she rested in the cottage, the dressing across her belly stiff but unstinking, she laid both her hands upon her heart and felt it beat in her chest. She felt the blood move throughout her and felt the air move through the window. It was quiet and Samuel did not come for many hours. She was quiet as well, only the sound of her heart in her ears; she could not even hear her breath until she sang “Create in me a clean heart, O God” and she knew that her prayer would be, had been, heard.

Mary Phinney

After the little horn primer, the Bible was the second book Mary studied. It sat in her father’s library beneath a window, so that sunlight would pour over it and even on a rainy evening, it would get whatever light the day had left in it. Her father’s desk was walnut and the walls were painted a deep blue where they were not stuffed with books. It was her favorite place inside the house. Her mother knew to find her there, on her little embroidered hassock or standing before the Bible, turning the pages. Mary was a good little girl so her chores were nearly always done before she stole away to the library but her mother shook her head when she had to scold her for not finishing a task so she might read again about Daniel or Deborah.

Ecclesiastes was very beautiful; the words had the perfection of a new leaf, the moon’s remove, the mirrors a lake and the sky made for each other, but it was not the book that Mary turned to now. Of the Gospels, she liked Luke best though she knew Jedediah would scowl and his laughter would be a bark if she told him how it reminded her of him. He was very well-read and his room was a little like her father’s library, but his books were all French and German, spines cracked and pages splayed to show spines and the splay of muscles dissected. He had had so much more for so long he had not studied the Bible as she had done. It was not familiar to him as it was to her. She knew it like she knew her skin, with sensation; her hair tumbling down, an extension barely perceived; her thoughts, words and image balanced. 

In the right mood, perhaps, if he had slept well or the day had not ended with a boy screaming for his mother, Jed might understand how she loved Ruth best of all. When she had first arrived at Mansion House, there were days when she had had to say to herself “Whither thou goest” again and again as shock after shock was interspersed with boredom, irritation, loneliness; she did not ask herself if she were thou or I, only knew the words in her mind were connection, within her and to the remnants of a world she recognized without. The verses were her Naomi now, since Anne Hastings wanted only to denigrate her and Miss Dix had thrown her here, giving her what she’d asked for.

Matron had found her a bed six weeks after she arrived. It was narrow and her coverlet was often her own petticoats bunched or the mourning shawl she had brought with her. She had been dreaming more and more—mundane and fantastic, of boys with beaks and wounds that spilled entrails or eels, flowers with faces where the pistil and stamen should be, Samuel mopping the hallway, nodding at her calmly. She hoped every night now for one dream. Then she crept through the shocked fields, stalks biting her bare feet under moonlight that was gentle and bright as a whale-oil lantern. She would find him and lie beside him, his rough skirt spread over her, the scent of him warm in her mouth. He would open his dark eyes and they would welcome her, all agreement, before he spoke and offered her meaures of grain, asked her for the ether, told her of Lincoln victorious in Hebrew she understood. In the dream, he would catch her round her waist and kiss her softly, and she knew she would conceive Obed.

Anne Hastings

In Anne’s experience, men mostly wanted to talk but had very little interest in listening. Nothing at Mansion House had disproved this, though the quality of the talk varied, to be sure. Even Summers, who talked less and less, still listened hardly at all; he spoke his few words, then retreated to his desk, his papers, and poured out the bourbon into a glass tumbler washed only with alcohol and his spit. It was hard to say who was worse, Hale or Foster. Byron spoke at great length of very little import, but he spoke so often and with so little range, he was easy to be around as she might let his words wash by her, the way the tide came in and pulled a little sand from the wells her feet made on the wet shore. Also, he had a pleasant voice when he wasn’t incensed at Foster and sometimes hummed through a surgery he felt confident he couldn’t botch. Foster was capable of interesting observations and able to match her own sharp wit—he could also retreat into a melancholic stupor which gave her respite. However, he was more forceful with his demands, noticed when he wasn’t getting the attention he felt he deserved, and was less predictable in general; the death of one boy might pass without a comment, while the man in the next bed drew forth a bellowed litany that made even the serene nuns grimace. She would not admit it, but she was glad of Phinney then. She seemed better able to calm Foster and was little troubled herself by his tirades. Anne had seen the small feline smile on Phinney’s face then as she placed a hand on Foster’s forearm, and had observed how he did not smile, but his eyes softened and the tone of his voice regained what approached equanamity for him. It was enough to make a woman believe in witchcraft but Phinney was not from Salem.

Even gravely ill soldiers preferred to talk, would spend their last breaths striving to utter a word although Anne already knew what they would say, who they would call for—“mother” or “wife” or “God!” As those entities were never readily available, Anne thought they might have done better to spend their last moments listening to Phinney or Sister Isabella sing, or even to her own voice reading or offering a prayer. She grudged them less as they suffered more. She still thought of how a woman in her labor was exhorted to be silent, in her labor and in her life, to listen and watch and manage. To be other, one must be a queen or be deemed unnatural like Miss Dix who had traded the asylums for the War.

This war seemed worse that Crimea. There were young boys here, many of them, with the hairless bodies of children, and brothers fought each other, neighbors—the enemy was impossible. They must destroy themselves, the hand striking the foot that kicked. And there were so many it seemed as if they rose from the earth itself, as if the dead only rested in the ground and then returned to fight anew. Destruction was inexhaustible. After Antietam, it was decided for her. She had no patience left for any Biblical reassurance, she could only read Job. She would walk away if the chaplain spoke of anything else, although he was a kind man, straight and tall. At least there was some understanding of suffering in Job, how it was like the ocean—endless, depthless, the diamonds of light on its surface a distraction from its keening dark. It comforted her to read of ancient scourges; there had been a woman named Channah then who had been just like her. There was always a woman just like her. 

It was the same though, Job and Satan and God, all male, all talking and talking and Job’s wife given short shrift as usual. Her torments were less, though Anne knew how it was to take the body of a child and wash it clean from vomit and blood and pus and then wrap it in a shroud she had made. She thought of God’s inquisition, “Where were you when I made the world?” and then of what a mother would say to a child, “And there I was and there you are, just so.” No woman would have needed to dice with Satan, a woman would have listened well enough to answer the challenge herself.

There was a soldier in the Crimea, a university don before he came to Scutari, who’d told her there were books left out of the Bible—it had been decided by a committee. She wondered what had been rejected and whether it had any greater wisdom. She liked to hope but it was probably only more of the same and she would do better to imagine the great behemoths in the wide oceans, the silence they enjoyed from men’s voices. Mermaids, of course, were mute.

Jane Green

Jane Green lay in her bed at night, while her husband slept beside her, and wondered when she had realized something was wrong. She had been carefully raised to her place and she had been exceptionally good at playing her part; even without pomade, her hair was always smoothed in two sleek wings to her skull. Her hem was never sullied. The correct words were always in her mouth and she spoke them in a lovely, low tone that men wanted to hear and women admired. She grew from girlhood to womanhood effortlessly and from bride to mother much the same. Perhaps when she lost the second baby after Emma that she began to see—fissures? Her life began to go awry. She had a son and a daughter, but only the two, and the boy was lame. She’d lost the second baby later in the pregnancy and had had to labor with it. It was another girl. The recovery was harder and she couldn’t sleep; her milk had come in and it took weeks to leave. She began to feel revulsion. James still made a little huffing sound as he slept but when she looked at him, he seemed to be not a stranger, but it was as if a neighbor or customer was in the bed. Which one of them did not belong?

How did James’s workers make tables for meals and rocking chairs for mothers with babies at their breasts and from the same wood, coffins? Why would they send Jimmy to a fine school but only let Emma have a series of indifferent governesses, although she was the brighter by far? It was only so long that she could avoid confronting the slaves in her house, in the street, everywhere—but yet not truly everywhere. There had been no slaves in Saratoga Springs when they visited the summer past. The hotel had still been gracious and well-run, the streets clean, gardens tended and full of chrysanthemums and peonies.

She could not reconcile positions. They were the people she entrusted her children to but they were not people. There were rules and then, all the exceptions. James could smile up at Belinda or praise his foreman Ephraim but he was able to sell Belinda’s brother and sleep just as easily while she lay awake in the bed beside him, wishing she could see a star. It was harder at night, when Emma was not always about to ask a question, when there was not lace to tat or a church social to plan. She’d resorted to the Bible. She supposed she ought to have started there. Galatians was her comfort and her goad. Paul wrote “there is neither slave nor free… for you are all one” but he also told of Hagar and Sarah, Hagar who was never freed but only exiled. It took an angel to save her and then, for what? 

She wished she had had a proper education, as her own brothers had. Then she might have found a way through it. She could not even bring herself to agree or disagree; how could one challenge fog? Instead, she stared up at the plastered ceiling and listened as Belinda walked down the hall to the nursery, where Jimmy cried ike a gull. 

Bridget Brannan

Bridget Brannan was waiting for the end. In the meantime, she was busy running the hospital in ways hardly anyone truly appreciated—perhaps the little Baroness was starting to take her measure and Nan Hastings was a sharp one and no mistake, but even those two had only begun to figure things out. The men, the officers and the patients alike, could hardly see beyond the noses on their faces which was no surprise to her. In general, they interested her only a little. Their problems were uncomplicated, live or die, suffer or not, Union or Reb. She preferred to keep her own counsel though she did like to talk to Mother Veronica from time to time and the little Southern miss, the proprietor’s daughter, was sometimes unexpectedly amusing. 

In the evenings, if the dying was done for the day, and the eating and the cleaning, she might pull up a chair beside Summers’s office and listen to him play his violin. She’d run her tongue over the gap in her gums where the rotten tooth had been and thank God for the dentist who’d rid her of it and the cloying taste of clove she’d been saddled with. It was good to feel her legs before her as she sat, her feet solid on the wooden planks. She’d Seen too much and welcomed anything that might blind her. She would sometimes move a rook or a bishop on the chessboard the chaplain had set up; he appeared to have little idea she was the actor but he was untroubled by his challenger and he and Foster seemed to enjoy another opponent. Neither one could really play worth a damn. Watching Nan try to size up the Baroness was only good for a quarter-hour or so—it was a shame Nan was so distracted by the title and the look in Foster’s eyes as she might have actually gotten a bit of a rest if they’d had been able to join forces. 

Bridget herself had found an unexpected fondness for the little Baroness who didn’t know her place or anyone else’s. She didn’t like the stream of whores in and out of the hospital but Phinney didn’t seem to care who liked much of anything she did and her little kitchen always had a kettle ready to brew. Phinney actually preferred tea to the ever-present coffee and was willing to share from the supply she’d brought from Boston. She and Foster were in trouble, that was clear with anyone with eyes to see, but she hoped Phinney would not be too broken by it. She doubted Foster would find a way through the tangle but he’d still be an officer and a rich man when all was said and done and he’d been a fool for so long, it should be familiar to him. 

When she ran out of distractions, her waiting resumed its priority. She could see them in the street every day, the white horse first, then the roan-red. The black stallion carried its scales in the saddle-bag when the rider wasn’t holding them aloft, and they jingled as the horse trotted, like sleigh-bells. The swords were anchored in bayonets and the blades were stained or rusted, still lethal. There were men who glanced at her and their blue eyes were the dragon’s or the beast’s and still Nan would set their cast or little Emma wipe away the sweat from their brow. Did Phinney See? She couldn’t be sure, though Mary had the look about her—a way of turning inward, of growing quite still like a stone or a flower before she went again about her business. Bridget would have liked to have spoken about the Seals and the Bowls, but someone was always calling away the one she wanted, or calling her away from herself; she was always just denied revelation.

Belinda Gibson

The English governess Emma had had when she was nine taught Belinda to read. She’d been a Miss Bennet, an adequate teacher for the girls; she didn’t provoke them to naughtiness and they’d seemed to learn how to do sums. She knew her place in the house better than Belinda had expected but some little part of her was a rebel, a very little part, enough to spend the minutes with Belinda and the little blue-covered book she taught Alice from. It had not taken Belinda very long to grasp and Miss Bennet had been willing to let Belinda put the book in her apron pocket while she was straightening up the nursery. Emma had been happy to spend the next several days drawing cats and learning French words “le chat, le petit chat!” instead of using her primer. The book had been heavy in Belinda’s pocket, slapping against her thigh like a second, stronger heart.

Belinda was not very sorry when Miss Bennet left them. She’d tired of them and they of her and she found a family in Savannah with three girls and one older son to break her heart over. It wasn’t clear she knew how much she’d given Belinda although it was the closest thing to freedom Belinda had. Emma was aware it wasn’t something she should talk about and Alice didn’t notice much so it was a secret easily kept for some time. The Greens were wealthy and the house was full of books but they were mostly secured in glass fronted cupboards; a little tassel dangled from the lock and the key lay in Mr. Green’s desk or in polished silver tray on Mrs. Green’s inlaid secretaire. Belinda had to practice reading with the girls’ books, which were simple and dull, or what she could see of the signs along the street as she walked by briskly. She could not afford to linger over a stray piece of newspaper or a novel left open in the parlor. She had little interest in either of those. The news of Alexandria meant nothing to her; things happened she could not change, she was of no account and thus the happenings were of no account to her. The idea that there was a world beyond Alexandria—Washington City, New York, California—was as if a the queen of the hive spoke to her of an uprising of drones. If the news of Alexandria meant nothing, novels meant even less. How could she care about people in a book when she could barely care for people in her life? There was only one book she wanted to read and she could not conceive of a way to get a copy for herself.

Emma found it suited her to be thought pious when she was about twelve years old and thus was given more than one gilt engraved Bible for her birthday. The books were made small enough for a lady’s hand, so they were fat with onion-skin pages. Emma made a show of arranging them in her room till her mother scolded her for acting like a Papist and setting up a little shrine. During this time, no one noticed when Emma gave Belinda her old Bible; it was a little larger and had a dull cover, the black worn grey. There were no illuminated letters at the start of a chapter and the pages were a little limp from the accumulated oils of being turned. It was the only gift Belinda had received since she was fourteen.

Even with the tutelage of Miss Bennet, Belinda found she was a slow reader but she was untroubled by it. The Book was not meant to be read at a fever pitch. The words dropped through her mind like stones sunk in a great river to form the base of a bridge above. She read mostly at dawn, when she might use the rising sun and not her candle to light the pages. She had waited such a long time to read it herself that she wasted little time on anything that did not seem essential. To Belinda, the Bible meant the Gospels and the Gospels meant Mark—the oldest, the simplest, the least adorned. She thought speaking of the beauty of the words was irrelevant. She did not care for beauty, only truth and that she had been starved of her whole life. She could recognize the most important parts—birth and suffering, betrayal. Death and resurrection. She did not need Mark to tell her how these things happened as much as that they had. Perhaps when the War ended, if she ever met her brother again, if she could take the Bible from its hiding place and read it with a candle she bought herself, then she would read Luke and Matthew. She might even read John.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is my response to the prompt "books." I thought it would be interesting to think about which book of the Bible was most meaningful to each of the major female characters in Mercy Street and what it would tell us about each woman. I started with the youngest and ended with the oldest. For those less familiar, the pairings are Alice-Genesis, Emma-Esther, Mary-Ruth, Anne-Job, Jane-Galatians, Matron-Revelations, Belinda-Mark. There is a little bit of romance but that's not the focus this time around. Miss Bennet is a little nod to Lizzie Bennett from Pride & Pedjudice, just because I thought it would be like Lizzie to teach Belinda to read.


End file.
